


Technicolour Heartbeat

by forgivenessishardforus



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Modern Era, POV Bellamy Blake, Reluctant Soulmates, Soulmates, fanfic mashup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 09:50:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9485843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgivenessishardforus/pseuds/forgivenessishardforus
Summary: It’s an ever-present tingle on his skin, the warmth of a banked fire in his bones, the somehow heavier weight of the air on his tongue (it’s like he can taste every molecule now), the increased vibrancy of colour to his newly sensitive eyes, including colours he hadn’t known existed (even whites and blacks are multihued). It lends a whole new definition to the word “alive”; if he had been living before, then now, now—To call it love would be romantic bordering on ridiculous. He’s been in love before (or thought he was), he’s seen people in love and none of them have ever mentioned, it makes you feel inhuman, superhuman, you can’t sleep at night because of how the blood thrums in your veins, even the darkness behind your eyelids is bursting with colour, you feel like a pile of dry kindling that the slightest spark will set ablaze, you feel hollow, you feel whole, like your skin is too tight for your body, like your soul is too big for your skin.And besides, she doesn’t even know who he is.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A very (very) long time ago, I asked people to submit prompts which I would then mash up into one big fic. This fic is (finally!) the first in that series, and contains the following prompts: 
> 
> 1\. Clarke is busking for some extra money and Bellamy stares at her, absolutely enthralled by her voice  
> 2\. I'm a Starbucks barista and this girl seems sad so, instead of writing her name on her cup I'll write: "You would be even prettier, if that's possible, with a smile"  
> 3\. I hate Christmas and I'm crying because I had a bad day and on top of all that my new neighbour is listening to Christmas carols so loud. I'm going to fight with him, nothing can stop me, except the fact that he's being nice and sweet. Goddammit.  
> 4\. Clarke wants to adopt a dog so she goes to an animal shelter where, coincidentally, Bellamy works  
> 5\. Midsummer Night
> 
> I took artistic liberty with some of these. Hope you enjoy!

_-July-_

His life changed the moment he saw her.

He knows, he knows—that’s the type of melodramatic statement that he would usually scoff and roll his eyes at (and after raising his sister through her teenage years, he’s intimately familiar with melodrama of all kinds) and yet there isn’t an easier way to say it: his life is tangibly, palpably different now that he knows she exists.

It’s an ever-present tingle on his skin, the warmth of a banked fire in his bones, the somehow heavier weight of the air on his tongue (it’s like he can taste every molecule now), the increased vibrancy of colour to his newly sensitive eyes, including colours he hadn’t known existed (even whites and blacks are multihued). It lends a whole new definition to the word “alive”; if he had been living before, then now, _now_ —

To call it love would be romantic bordering on ridiculous. He’s been in love before (or thought he was), he’s seen people in love and none of them have ever mentioned, _it makes you feel inhuman, superhuman, you can’t sleep at night because of how the blood thrums in your veins, even the darkness behind your eyelids is bursting with colour, you feel like a pile of dry kindling that the slightest spark will set ablaze, you feel hollow, you feel whole, like your skin is too tight for your body, like your soul is too big for your skin._

And besides, she doesn’t even know who he is.

He had seen her for the first time three weeks ago, when he’d been walking along the quay with his sister, splitting a basket of fries between the two of them and enjoying the taste of a late summer evening. Actually, he had heard her first, the strum of her guitar vibrating along his nerves, the clear, high notes of her voice ringing off his ribcage. Those first few notes had called to something within him, something he hadn’t known was there, and Octavia’s voice had faded into the background as he moved towards the music, desperate to see its source.

The girl was sitting in the street, leaned up against a building, guitar in her lap and case open in front of her for tips. Her head was tilted towards the sky, eyes closed, golden hair in a messy knot on her head, lips a perfect shade of red. That first sight of her hit him like a train going a hundred miles per hour, shattering everything he’d thought he’d known and knocking him senseless for a timeless second, and when he’d come back to himself the world had changed.

“Do you believe in soulmates?” he’d asked Octavia, still dazed, when she’d finally dragged him away.

His little sister, always a dreamer, a bone-deep romantic, had looked at him out of the corner of her eye and said, “Of course not.”

He hadn’t either, not until that night. But what other explanation was there? Certainly nothing he could explain through science. Nothing that could be explained by all the history of the world.

He returned to the quay every night he wasn’t working; sometimes she would be there and sometimes she wouldn’t. When she was, it felt like every atom in his body was trembling with an energy he couldn’t contain and he was moments away from exploding. When she wasn’t, it felt like the air was water in his lungs and he was moments away from drowning.

On the nights she was there he would wait in the shadows, watching her, listening. Her presence was like a soothing balm on a burn. Her presence was what caused the burn in the first place. She set him on fire and then she brought the storm that put it out.

If he made her feel the same, she gave no indication. Her eyes rarely opened while she played and at the end of the night she would pack up quickly, zip her guitar into its case and sling it over her shoulder and stride down the street like she had somewhere important to be. Once or twice she glanced over to the shadows where he hid—he could feel her gaze brushing over him like a feather tickling his skin—but her eyes always passed through him without seeing.

Then as the cool nights of fall arrived, she vanished altogether. Night after night, he walks the quay alone, his hope of seeing her again fading every time he passes by her spot and it’s empty.

He tries to forget her, but he can’t. She haunts his dreams, his waking moments: behind every voice in the street he thinks he can hear her song. He thinks that every blonde head in a crowd is hers.

He doesn’t even know her name.

- _October_ -

A cold gust of air enters the shop as the door opens; he looks up out of habit and his heart stops.

It’s her, hair in a windblown messy braid over her shoulder, eyes piercingly blue as they meet his—the first time she’s looked at him, he’s sure, and he feels her gaze like a knife to the heart. Does he imagine her pausing for a moment on the threshold? Does he imagine the way the buzzing on his skin increases in frequency, until the edges of his vision begin to blur? Surely not.

If she does hesitate it’s only for a fraction of a second before she strides up to the counter. Her scent drifts towards him, something that is like the crisp sweetness of fall and the familiarity of old books and the freshness of the first flowers of spring.

“What can I get for you?” he asks, and his voice doesn’t shake in the slightest.

“Vanilla soy latte,” she says, “venti, please.” Her voice is not the same as when she’s singing; it’s a little bit deeper, cuts through him in a completely different way.

“Sure thing,” he says, and this time his voice might tremble a little. “Your name?”

“Clarke.”

 _Clarke_. The word whistles through the air towards him, lodges itself in his heart so that he can hear it in every beat. _Clarke, Clarke, Clarke._

She looks serious, distracted, distraught, and she hasn’t glanced at him since their eyes first met as she walked through the door. As he stumbles through a “ _That’ll be $5.45, please_ ” she pulls out her phone, scrolls through the messages even as she slides a one and a five across the counter.

“No change,” she says absentmindedly, eyes still on her phone, a small wrinkle appearing between her brow.

 _Look at me_ , he thinks, almost desperately. Whatever connection there is between them, thoughts don’t transcend it, and she walks to the other end of the counter to wait for her drink.

What would it take to get her to notice him? He wants nothing more to look in her eyes again, perhaps be the reason for a smile on her serious face. Before he can overthink it, he scribbles _You would be even more beautiful with a smile_ on the cup beneath her name, adding a lopsided smiley at the end.

He pours the drink into the cup, swirls the foam on top, slides it across to her and says her name—it tastes foreign and forbidden on his tongue, a secret he shouldn’t be sharing.

She picks it up and reads his message, turns without a word towards the door. His stomach sinks, and an aching coldness sweeps through him.

Not a smile, not even a glance.

The wind catches the door as she leaves, and it slams shut with a _bang!_ like a gunshot behind her.

_-December-_

On the first day of the month he sees her out his living room window, hauling cardboard boxes out of a white truck and through the front doors of his apartment building. He hears her a couple minutes later, her voice and one he doesn’t recognize just outside his door:

“Mom, I’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure? This is…very sudden.”

“Yes. I…” A pause, and then, “I just need some space. I’m sorry.”

For a moment, he considers going out into the hall to greet her, to catch another glimpse of that face, but before he’s worked up the courage the door to her apartment slams with finality, and minutes later through the thin walls, he hears the unmistakeable sound of weeping.

He doesn’t see her again until two days later, when a hammering sounds at his door, accompanied by an angry voice: “Please turn that damn music off! December 3rd is far too early to be playing Christmas carols, and I’m trying to study!”

Her voice resonates deep in the cavity of his chest, increases the strength of the tingling on his skin. With a couple stumbling steps, he makes it to the door, presses his eye to the peephole, and is pretty sure his heart stops when he sees her standing on the other side.

Blonde hair is in loose waves about her shoulders, tear tracks on her cheeks, eyes red, and a scowl is twisting her lips. His hand is shaking as he places it on the doorknob, turns it, and opens the door so they come face to face.

“Oh, God,” she says, scowl sliding off her face and hands, which had been hard on her hips, hanging limply at her sides. “It’s you.” She sounds defeated, displeased, upset.

“What do you mean, ‘It’s you’?” The words come out half-strangled, tasting of despair. Tiny electric shocks are dancing along his skin, stinging and prickling before sinking into his blood.

“It doesn’t—it doesn’t matter. I need to go.” She turns and is two steps down the hallway before he reaches out to stop her, hand wrapping around her arm. A lightning bolt jolts through him at the contact, a flash of heat like a wildfire, but he doesn’t let go. He doesn’t know if he can. She jumps at his touch like she too has been shocked before stiffening.

“You feel it, too,” he says wonderingly.

“Let go of me,” she hisses, sounding almost in pain. Her arm is shaking beneath his grip and with an immense effort he forces himself to release her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do,” he begins, and then stops. “Or is it different for you?”

She ignores him, one hand unconsciously rubbing the spot on his arm where he’d been holding her. “I need to go,” she repeats. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Wait, Clarke,” he calls after her as she’s turning away, and she freezes in place. “I’ll tell you what it feels like for me.” The words spill out of his mouth in a rush. “Ever since the first time I saw you—five months ago, you were playing your guitar by the quay—I’ve had this feeling like my skin is always prickling. It’s stronger when you’re around. And everything’s _more_ , somehow; my sight is sharper, colours are brighter, sounds ring clearer. There’s a fire in my bones that flares hot when I see you, when I hear you. Tell me—tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

For a long time, she’s silent—long enough that hope starts to leak out of him, the warmth inside of him replaced by something colder, darker. But she doesn’t leave, she doesn’t move, standing as if frozen three paces from his door.

“It’s different for me,” she says at last, voice hardly louder than a whisper. It shivers through him. “Like I’m a guitar, and someone’s strumming my strings. Like someone’s stitching patterns over my skin, sewing me up so tight I can’t breathe. Colours pulse and flare, a technicolour heartbeat. It’s overwhelming and I want it to stop.”

“You do?” he asks. “It’s not…it doesn’t get better, when you’re near me?”

She shakes her head and an icy wind with shard-sharp edges blows through him. “I’m sorry.”

“Wait,” he says again when she moves as if to leave. “Please…come inside. We can talk about this. Try to understand it.”

She huffs out a laugh. “I’m not sure I want to.”

“Don’t you want to know what it means? Why it’s happening to us? If it’s because we’re—” He stops short of finishing his sentence, but she finishes it for him.

“What, soulmates?” she scoffs. “I don’t believe in that. Whatever is going on here, I’m sure there’s a logical explanation. And unless that explanation will let me know how to make it go away, I’m not sure I care what it is.”

“How can you just—”

“Look—you’re cute, and you seem nice, and if things were different I’m _sure_ I’d love to come inside and hope for a Christmas miracle.” She gives a small, wavering smile that does something funny to his heart. “But as it is—I have a lot going on right now, and I don’t appreciate feeling like I’m a puppet and someone’s pulling my strings. So…I’m going to go home. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

She lifts her hand in a half-hearted wave, one he doesn’t return. His eyes follow her as she enters her apartment, the one right next door to his own, and then with a sigh that doesn’t encapsulate the empty feeling within him he returns to his own apartment.

In a fit of pettiness, though, he doesn’t turn down the Christmas music. Instead he turns it up, singing along obnoxiously in an attempt to drown out his thoughts.

Of course, no amount of music can mask the vibrations that dance along his skin, the fire in his blood, the kaleidoscope way that colours seem to spin.

He breaks out a bottle of rum, one that Octavia had given him for his birthday and he’d been saving for months, and pours himself a healthy glass. In one gulp he downs it all, relishing the way it burns down his throat, warms his belly in an entirely natural way.

“Merry fucking Christmas,” he mutters to himself, pouring another glass.

_-January-_

She moves out at the end of January. He’s lounging on the couch on a Saturday morning, relishing a rare day off, when he hears several loud thuds from the hallway; peeking his head around his door, he sees Clarke stumbling out of her apartment with a box in her arms, several other boxes already on the floor.

“Where are you going?” he asks, although of course he already knows. The knowledge has lodged itself in his heart like a frozen stone.

“Isn’t that obvious?” she replies, flicking her hair out of her eyes. “I’m moving. One of my friends has a spare bedroom, so.”

“You’re running away,” he states flatly, and she glares at him.

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe this isn’t about you?”

“Just a coincidence, I’m sure,” he says sarcastically. “Are you just hoping that it’ll…go away, if we never see each other? If you move to the other side of the city?”

“In a word: yes,” she snaps. “Maybe _you_ think that…whatever this is…means that we’re soulmates, that we should stay by each other, that we need to be friends, but personally I don’t. And I don’t _want_ it to mean anything, because I have little enough control over my life as it is. Besides, I have a girlfriend and we’re happy and…I don’t need to explain myself to you.”

“You don’t,” he admits, “but I wish you would. Because I…I don’t want this feeling to go away.”

She stares at him for a disconcertingly long time, expression inscrutable. “Say this means what you think it means,” she says, “that we’re soulmates. Are you really okay with being my soulmate just because the universe is asking you to? Don’t you think that’s something you should decide for yourself? You don’t even _know_ me.”

“I know that you play guitar and sing,” he offers weakly. “I know you drink espresso. I know that you hate Christmas carols and I know you watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine because you’ve been playing it so loud I can hear it through the walls—”

She’s shaking her head before he even finishes. “None of that is who I am,” she says. “Things I do, things I like or dislike, yes, but not enough to say you know me. And the only reason you _want_ to get to know me is because of this…feeling.”

“That’s not true,” he objects. “The first time I heard you sing—”

“But it’s impossible to _know_ ,” she interrupts. “You’ll never know if you want to get to know me because of who I am, or because of how I make you feel.”

“And how is what you’re doing any different?” he challenges. “How is running away because how _I_ make you feel any different from me wanting to get to know you because of how _you_ make me feel?”

A drawn out pause. Then: “It’s not,” she says quietly.

“Then—why don’t you come have coffee with me?” he asks, hearing and hating the note of desperation in his voice. “I can use my employee discount and we can talk and decide if we want to get to know each other based on who we actually are.”

“I’m sorry, I’d rather not,” she says. “I’m not—I’m not looking for friends right now. And I’m not looking for anything more. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do have other things I need to be doing.”

“What about your girlfriend?” he asks. “Does she know—about this? About us?”

Ignoring him, Clarke drops the box in her arms to the ground with a resounding thud, then spins on her heel. The door to her apartment closes behind her with a ringing finality. The sound vibrates along his skin with a sting like a razor blade, digs into the hollows of his bones.

Gritting his teeth against the sensation, he forces himself back inside his own apartment, closes the door with a shaking hand, leans against it with his eyes closed.

Colours pulse even behind his eyelids, painfully vibrant hues. The TV he’d left on is suddenly too loud to bear, the voices rattling through him with a force that threatens to tear his ligaments apart. Burning sparks land at the corner of his eyes, his lips, the base of his teeth, underneath his fingernails.

God, how can she stand it?

_-March-_

Even with her gone, the feeling doesn’t wane. As he had known it wouldn’t. But he becomes adjusted to it, almost, as the months pass. Most days, he can’t remember what it’s like, to not feel like his body is constantly burning.

Sometimes, he’s sure he sees her: down an aisle at the grocery store, on the other side of the street, through a crowd of people, golden head visible. Every time he does, the feelings that had become background suddenly flares hot and bright. But always her back is to him, and if she senses his presence the way he senses hers, she gives no sign.

He sees her more frequently than can be attributed to coincidence, but then he doubts that anything had been a coincidence when it came to the two of them: not him walking down the quay the night she had been playing, not her walking into Starbucks on the day he’d been working, not her moving into and then out of the empty apartment next to him. Part of him believes that she can try to stay away from him for as long as she wishes, but eventually the universe will pull them together. (He believes this because he has to.)

This doesn’t mean he doesn’t try to forget; a cute barista at work, Gina, asks him out, and he says yes. She’s nice, and shares his interest in history; she’s spontaneous, adventurous, funny, the kind of girl he could see himself falling in love with, if it wasn’t for—

Being with Gina doesn’t help him ignore the feeling; if anything, it makes it worse. The tingling on his skin becomes more like an itch, sounds and colours jarring instead of simply sharper, brighter. After a month, he can’t take it anymore; he breaks things off with her when they’re in the middle of marathoning _Rome_ in his apartment.

“I can’t do this,” he says, far blunter than he’d meant to. The words had come without planning, bubbling off his tongue the instant he’d thought them.

For her part, Gina takes it well; smiling sadly at him, she says, “There’s someone, else, right?” He doesn’t answer and she continues, “I’d suspected for a while now. But hey, it was worth a shot, right?”

“I’m sorry,” he says because he feels he needs to say _something_. She shrugs, picks up her sweater from where it had been slung over the back of his couch.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “I hope it works out for you.” She presses a kiss to his cheek, whispers in his ear, “Take care, Bellamy,” and then she’s gone.

After Gina, there’s an emptiness in his chest that seems to grow with every passing day, a cold void that battles with the fire under his skin. He finds himself searching for Clarke with a desperation that embarrasses him: craning his neck in public, driving at random down unfamiliar streets, entering shops he had no intention of purchasing from on the off chance she was there. He continues to catch flashes and glimpses of her, but nothing concrete; only ever a brief respite for the aching inside of him.

Staying busy helps, he finds, so in rare hours between being a barista and a mechanic, he volunteers at a local dog shelter. He’s at the shelter on a windy, cloudy day in March when he sees her again. It had been a couple of weeks since he’d last crossed paths with her in public, and the sight of her walking through the door—knit cap on her head but a couple of windblown strands curled around her face, cheeks ruddy, talking animatedly to the girl next to her—is enough to make his heart contract painfully and then swell until it seems to fill the entirety of his ribcage, squeezing the air from his lungs so that it escapes him in a relieved sigh like a set of bellows being compressed.

Until that moment, he hadn’t realized just how afraid he’d been that he’d never see her again—that she’d found a way to escape him, moved to a different city, a different country, where she wouldn’t feel the things that tied them together. Sensing her again now is what he imagines it must be like to feel the sun for the first time after spending one’s whole life underground, overwhelmingly bright and bold and beautiful, intoxicating and invigorating and intensely warm.

She either hears his sigh or she too feels the change in her being now that they’re in the same room together because her head turns and her eyes find him, despite the fact that he’s mostly hidden behind a shelf that holds bags of dog food.

Their gazes meet and to his complete and utter shock, she smiles—wide mouth, full teeth—and his heart turns over, an engine roaring to life.

Her friend still hasn’t seen him, hasn’t seemed to realize that the energy in the room changed the second they walked in the door. “Hello,” she says to the boy who stands behind the counter, striding purposefully towards him, seemingly unhindered by the brace that supports her left leg. “I’m here to buy a dog.”

Clarke breaks eye contact to follow her friend, sending a rush of disappointment through him. It only takes him a moment to recover, though, before he clears his throat and steps out from behind the shelf.

“I can help with that,” he says. “Follow me.” He leads them both back to the visitation room and gestures them inside. “What kind of dog were you thinking?”

“Something big,” the girl says. “Part German Shepard or mastiff or greyhound, something like that.”

“Big dogs tend to have a lot of energy,” he cautions hesitantly. “They can be hard to keep up with.” Unintentionally, he glances down at the girl’s leg, and she glares at him.

“I can keep up with a dog just fine, thanks,” she says testily. His face grows hot.

“Right. Well, then, I’ll be right back.” With Monty’s help, he leashes three dogs from the back—the genetic makeup of any of them unknown, but they all certainly fit the bill of “big”—and leads them into the room.

“They’re rescues,” he says as the girl holds out a hand for the dogs to sniff, “as are all of our dogs here. These ones aren’t vicious or dangerous, but they can be a little temperamental.”

“Just like Raven,” Clarke quips, and her friend chuckles. Her face has softened considerably since the dogs were brought into the room, a small smile curving her lips.

“Do they have names?”

“Boston, Paprika, and Athena,” he says gesturing appropriately. “Would you like to…” His sentence trails off as Boston stretches eagerly to the end of his leash, trying to clamber into Raven’s lap. He lets the dog go and immediately Raven’s arms go around him, scratching behind the ears.

He’s seen this dozens of times before, but it still brings a smile to his lips. Usually once a customer started bonding with a dog it was like he didn’t exist, so he retreats to the far wall, Paprika and Athena’s leashes still loosely held in his hand. Both dogs seemed content to curl up by his feet and watch their friend’s antics.

Clarke leans up against the wall beside him. There’s a finger-width of space between their shoulders, but that doesn’t stop an electric current from jumping between them; he forces himself to keep his attention on Boston, who now has his paws on Raven’s shoulders and is licking at her face.

“I thought I might see you here,” Clarke says quietly. Surprised, he glances at her out of the corner of his eye. The side of her mouth is tilted up and all the hostility that had been there the last time he’d seen her is gone.

“What’s changed?” he asks warily.

“I think…you were right,” she says. “Maybe not about all of it, I don’t know. But—”

She breaks off when Raven looks up at them, beaming smile and bright eyes. “I think I better take this one,” she says with a laugh. Boston’s attempted to curl himself in his lap, ignoring the fact that it’s been several years since he was small enough to manage such a feat.

“That didn’t take too long,” Clarke comments.

“Didn’t need to. Sometimes you just…know.” Raven scratches at the soft fur between Boston’s ears and Bellamy feels his eyes sliding towards Clarke, iron filings to a lodestone. She feels his gaze, returns it with a warm smile and a small laugh, and it feels like flames are licking up his skin. Not in a bad way, just in a way that manages to wipe all thoughts from his mind.

After returning Paprika and Athena to their kennels he leads them back to the front of the store, waits while Raven fills out the paperwork and Monty gives her the rundown on vaccinations and preferred food and gives her a collar and a chew toy to take home with her. Clarke hovers a few feet from him, bottom lip between her teeth, before seeming to come to a decision.

“Listen,” she says, the words escaping her in a rush, “do you want to go for coffee with me sometime? Maybe later this week?”

“Yeah,” he manages, “yeah, that’d be great. When?”

“I’ll find you,” she says with a little laugh. “I’m sure of it.”

She does find him, two days later, walking into Starbucks when he only has ten minutes left in his shift.

“Your timing is uncanny,” he tells her when she approaches the counter to order, and then when she reaches for her wallet, “Oh no, don’t worry about it. It’s on the house.”

She takes her drink to a booth in the corner and he slides in across from her ten minutes later, after he’s clocked out.

“Hi,” he says, suddenly awkward.

“Hi,” she returns, looking up at him before averting her eyes. A beat passes in silence, and then:

“I broke up with my girlfriend,” she tells him, hands wrapped around her cup and gazing down at the pattern swirled in the latte foam. “I loved her, you know. Thought she was my soulmate. But when I saw you for the first time last year…being with her had never made me feel like that.”

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. He doesn’t know what else to say.

She shrugs. Her eyes are still intently focused on her untouched drink, and a small furrow has appeared between her brows. “It feels…different now. I understand what you meant, when you said you didn’t want this feeling to go away. I didn’t, before; before it felt like nails, like a static charge, a low-tone buzz that was constantly in my ears. And it got worse any time you were near.”

“ _Oh_ ,” he says, and at the sudden understanding in his voice she finally raises her gaze to meet his. “Because you were with her.”

“How did you—”

“I dated someone else, too. I ended it after a couple of weeks because…well, because of what you said. Everything felt wrong.”

She huffs a laugh at that. “I was in denial for much longer. But, you know, I felt like I had so little control over my life—I didn’t want this to be out of my control, too. I wanted to be in charge of just _one_ thing.”

The urge to reach out to her is almost overwhelming, and he stops himself just short, curling his hand into a fist under the table. To be sitting across from her now is heady, distracting: the scent of her soap wafts off her, lavender with a hint of honey, and fragments of sunlight coming in through the window have caught in her hair, making it glow.

“Look,” she says, “I still don’t know if I believe in soulmates. But I do know that when I fall in love, I need it to be because it’s what _I_ want, not because it’s what the universe wants. So…”

“So?” he asks, unable to contain the hope that bubbles up in his chest.

“So would you like to get to know each other? Go on a couple of real dates, before deciding that this is what we want?”

“I’d love that.” He’d already decided what he wanted, had known from the moment he’d first seen her, but if she wanted to take it slow he was more than happy to do so.

_-June-_

The bonfire is already spitting sparks into the night, flaming ashes that hang like stars against an indigo backdrop before burning out and falling back to Earth. He watches them for a moment from a distance, before turning his attention back to Clarke. A small crowd is gathered in front of the stage, but she is oblivious to the attention: guitar in her lap and head tilted towards the sky, an expression of peace on her face. Just looking at her causes something bright and hot and sharp to flare bright in his chest, a shower of sparks that doesn’t go out.

Over the past few months, he’s come to learn everything about her. He knows she talks in her sleep, that she likes to draw but she treats her art like it’s a secret (he had been so flattered when she had shyly shown him her sketchbook), that she can’t cook anything more complicated than pancakes and even those are likely to burn. He’s become familiar with her constant energy, her need to always be moving, her desire to fix things that weren’t hers to fix.

He knows that her father died last November, that for months she and her mother had hardly spoken because neither knew what to say. He knows she had a breakdown her first semester of college because she thought she was doing what was expected of her, not what she truly wanted; he understands why she had run so hard and so long from him and the possibility of a future she couldn’t control.

And God, he loves her.

Yes, part of him had loved her from the second he saw her, when part of his soul had called out to hers and changed everything, but the love he felt then is not the same as what he feels now. This kind of love consumes him, completes him, creates him. He feels that love now, unfurling in his chest like a flower at the first breath of spring, as he watches Clarke on stage.

Her hair is tied up in a loose bun, burnished copper by the orange lights. Her eyes are closed as she sings into the mic, fingers plucking at the strings of her guitar. She looks beautiful, almost the same as when he’d first seen her a year before. But different, too, because now he knows her. Her music, as always, mesmerizes him, sinks through his skin and into his blood, into his bones.

When her set is done she finds him standing to the side of the stage. Her smile is bright, her cheeks still flushed from her performance, and when she takes his hand a warm shiver rolls through him.

“You were incredible,” he tells her.

“Thanks,” she says, absentminded. “Come with me.”

She pulls him into the crowd around the bonfire, where people are chatting or laughing or dancing; and then she turns to face him, and in her eyes is a steady determination that is another thing he loves about her.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says, lifting his hand so he can feel her heart beat in her chest. It thumps to the same rhythm as his own—that was something he had discovered a couple months ago, the first time she’d spent the night—and when his speeds up so does hers, a rapid _thump-da-thump_ under his fingers.

“What?” His voice is hoarse, and she smiles.

(She knows everything about him, too: she knows that sometimes he snores, that he wakes up before eight even on mornings when he doesn’t need to work, that a couple shots of tequila will numb his tongue so much he forgets how to speak; she knows that he dreams of being an anthropologist but has never been able to afford to go to school, that he talks to his sister every night on the phone and they meet up every Sunday or sooner for dinner; she knows that when surrounded by books the world will go silent around him, and he can spend ages running his fingers down spines or breathing in the pages without reading a single word.)

When she goes up on her toes to whisper it in his ear, his entire world flushes red.

“Are you sure?” he whispers.

She nods, gently brushing the hair off his forehead, her fingers leaving a trail of sparks. “Very sure,” she replies. And then she kisses him—not for the first time but for what might as well be the first, a fire starting where their lips meet and quickly roaring through him, stars exploding in his chest and behind his closed eyelids.

“I love you, too,” he says when they break apart. Each word is technicolour, bursting in the air between them. “In case you didn’t know already.”

“I knew,” she says, with a small smile that tugs on his heart. “But it’s still nice to hear it.”

“You’ll be hearing it a lot,” he manages before she’s kissing him again, tugging his face down to hers and winding her arms about his back, pulling him against her so tightly that he can feel his edges start to blur where they meet hers.

Behind them, the bonfire still spits sparks into the sky, and people shout and dance and laugh in celebration of midsummer’s night; but here, the entire world seems to have come to a standstill, a point of focus that narrows in around them, a singularity that contains within it every aspect of this infinite moment.

_-December-_

Over time, the feeling she had ignited in his bones fades, becoming something more comfortable, more natural. The warmth of sunlight rather than a fire, less likely to burn. Colours are still bright, sounds sharp, everything clearer and _more_ than it had been before he met her, but never overwhelmingly so. His skin only tingles when he holds her, which he does often; not because of how it makes him feel but because of how _she_ feels, soft curves and warm skin, heartbeat fluttering beneath the touch of his hands. Sometimes, he puts a palm over her heart and one over his own, just so he can feel them beat in tandem.

Two parts of the same whole. His soulmate.

She moves out of Raven’s spare bedroom and into his. His pantry fills up with her preference in cereal and pasta, and there’s always orange juice in her fridge because she prefers that to coffee in the mornings. He almost always wakes up before her and some days he’ll make her breakfast but most often he’ll stay lying next to her, feeling the joy that comes from her presence next to him radiate through his body.

The anniversary of her father’s death comes, and he brings her flowers that they take to his grave. She takes him home to meet her mother, and he senses that things between them are slowly healing. He gets a job as a research assistant for the university’s history department, and quits the job at the car shop (not the one at Starbucks, though, because he likes the discount on coffee). She finishes another semester of school and she’s positive now, she tells him, that this is what she wants to do; she draws more frequently, half-finished drawings filling all the crevices of their home.

When Christmas arrives again, he blasts his favourite carols through his speakers and dances in socked feet in the kitchen. She rolls her eyes at him before pulling out her guitar and singing along.

Happiness swells up in his chest, too big for his body to contain; he can almost feel it radiating off of him in waves, tinting the air with a colour he can’t put a name to. And this feeling, he thinks, is something that would have been worth waiting his whole life for.

She looks over at him, smile crinkling up the corners of her eyes, and he knows she feels the same.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, you can find me on tumblr: forgivenessishardforus


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